Hi. The layout of my PC is as follows. It has 2 Hard drives,an old 40Gb one that is split into an 11Gb partition (C) and a 27Gb partition (D), and a 150Gb on that was not partitioned (H). When i fitted the 150Gb one i cloned my C drive to my H drive and set the H drive to Master and it booted off the H drive no problem. Somehow the OS on H became corrupted and i switched it back to boot off C which it also did no problem. In order not to lose the data on H but still wanting to install the OS on the newer HD, I created a new partition on H using Gnome Partition Creator so now the new hard drive is split into 122Gb (H) and 25GB (G). I cloned C onto G but cannot work out how to make it boot from there. I tried altering the boot.ini file on G to tell it to look at partition(2), but that did not solve the problem. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
To boot off the second partition of a second drive, make sure you've changed both sections of the boot.ini file. Changed parts in bold. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect Remember, 0 represents the first drive, and 1 the second. However, for the partitions...1 is the first, and 2 is the second. Confusing, but that's Microsoft for ya! Hope that helps.
Thanks, but I have tried that as well. I also tried replacing the old hard drive with the new one so it had the same place on the ribbon and leaving the rdisk code at 0 and the partition at 2.
The problem may not lie in changing the single line, but adding the additional line to give you a menu. The boot sequence just doesn't know where to look for the boot files for XP. Ok....what might work, is don't clone C to G. Install XP fresh to the G partition. But if you really want to do it right, you'll start over completely fresh...cuz this confused me to the point of almost having to write it all down on paper just to see the whole picture! A good setup for those two drives could be: New Drive C: 150GB Old Drive D: 10GB Old Drive E: 30GB Reason I am saying, is that you can set XP on C, all your games and stuff will be fine on a drive that large. Then, we can show you how to set your pagefile and temp folders to D and you'll still have E for 30GBs of leftover storage. Having the pagefile on a second drive, first partition helps the system run faster then leaving it on the primary drive. Your temp files being on the second drive not only allows you faster load times for webpages (browser loads from first drive, cache folders on second)...most software installation packages extract the programs first to your temp folders. Installing from one drive to another is way faster than from the same drive. Note: If the second drive fails, or you remove it from the system, XP will automatically move the pagefile and temp folders back to C.
